It may not have occurred to you that your phone company can have a disaster of its own, or that a disaster for them can quickly become one for you. In this three-part series, Leo Wrobel talks about ways to mitigate some of Mother Nature's fury by preparing in advance for catastrophe. Part 1 discusses some quick-and-dirty (and cheap!) ways to switch over incoming calls from your call center when it's swamped (maybe literally).

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Just Can’t Get Through to You

In today’s organizations, telecommunications connectivity is king.
Whether the application is an inbound call center answering 800 numbers or a
server taking orders from thousands of web-enabled users, telecommunications is
often the lynchpin of business. Stated another way, when the telecommunications
network fails, the organization’s cash register stops.

NOTE

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume that the term 800
number refers to any toll-free or pay-per-minute service, although of
course a variety of numbers can be used to provide such services.

In order to understand the dynamics in play here, consider the typical
workstation in a service-oriented company. This is the front-line interface to
the customer and the funnel through which cash enters the organization. This
workstation can be engaged in any number of activities: selling airline tickets,
trading stock, taking orders for that wonderful blending machine that just aired
in a commercial on Channel 33.

Taking that last item as an example for a moment, imagine spending tens of
thousands of dollars to air that commercial, only to have the people calling to
purchase the blender greeted by an "All circuits are busy now"
recording. Impulse buyers like these probably won’t call back again
later—indeed, they may not even remember your number 10 seconds after
Channel 33 returns to the evening movie.

Or consider the stockbroker. Someone who calls in to sell 10,000 shares of
AT&T wants to make that transaction now. If that doesn’t happen,
these users can be pretty unforgiving. Someone attempting to use Joe’s
Brokerage might just decide that Jan’s Brokerage would be a more reliable
provider.

The same holds true for the airlines. Sure, if one airline is running a
fantastic sale, the caller might be inclined to call back again later. But
realistically speaking, how often does that happen? Carriers operate under
essentially the same costs, and match each other’s fares quickly whenever
one puts tickets on sale. Unless the caller is a member of a particular
airline’s frequent flier club, he or she will probably hang up and call
someone else. Certainly a travel agent will do so unless a traveler specifies
otherwise, because the agency’s work time is valuable.

The reason I used these specific examples is that airlines, brokerages, and
home shopping clubs often have elaborate telecommunications recovery plans for
precisely these reasons. "That’s fine," you may say. "They
can afford to have elaborate plans. But what about smaller businesses?"
Surprisingly, having a telecommunications recovery plan may be much more
affordable than you think, because a lot of the capital-intensive part of the
process has already been accomplished by the telecommunications companies
themselves. For example, did you know the following facts?

There is absolutely no reason why your inbound 800 calls could not
be answered at an alternate location within 10 minutes of a disaster.

There is virtually no reason why your company’s main
telephone numbers could not be answered at an alternate location within one hour
of a disaster.

There is virtually no reason why web-enabled services could not be
redirected elsewhere within hours of a disaster.